As a mail order company specialising in homewares and clothing, Erwin Müller saw that inquiries and purchases were increasingly taking place on mobile devices. They decided to improve the user friendliness of their mobile site step by step. In collaboration with Google, they began by carrying out a detailed analysis of the mobile website to identify and prioritise the most relevant and effective user experience improvements that were required.
About Erwin Müller
Founded in 1951
www.erwinmueller.com
Rundown Goals
Improve mobile user experience
Rundown Approach
Identified and prioritised most relevant and effective changes required
Executed improvements to mobile site’s navigation and checkout
Rundown Results
Increased revenue on mobile by 69% year-over-year
Increased number of orders on mobile by 81% year-over-year
Reduced shopping cart abandonment by 32%
Once Google and Erwin Müller had completed their analysis of the mobile site experience, they pinpointed two areas of focus: the overall navigation and the checkout.
In terms of navigation, the team found that very small elements meant that users were constantly confronted with an automatic zoom, which significantly restricted usability. They decided to increase interaction surfaces and fonts to provide better visibility and ease of use.
Beyond the user experience of the input fields and buttons, Erwin Müller was also keen to facilitate navigation of the site as a whole. With this in mind, they introduced upward and downward arrows to clearly indicate the categories and subcategories of the menu, and they also increased the size of the individual options to allow for easier interaction.
Since there are four different starting pages that are a frequent touch point for users on their way through the website, the team identified that users needed to be able to choose from the four main categories – “at home”, “table and kitchen”, “baby and child” and “textiles” – in the visible area of every start page. This simple enhancement led to a reduction in bounce rate of 25%. Overall, the improvements to the navigation and the implementation of larger fonts and input fields led to a reduction in cart abandonment of 32%.
The team also made significant improvements to the checkout process. Seeing that new users might be deterred by an obligatory registration, the inclusion of a guest checkout helped Erwin Müller reduce the likelihood of checkout abandonment. This is now set as the default option, with registration only available as an additional option at the end of the guest checkout form field.
To improve user experience further, the team also inverted the order of the individual checkout steps. The initial step of the checkout no longer asks users to select their payment method, but instead asks for the delivery details first.
In another measure to reduce checkout abandonment, exit points and distractions were removed. Previously, users were able to access the menu as well as the search during the checkout process. In the new version, all navigation elements have been removed except for the company logo, which directs users to the homepage.
On top of these major changes, Erwin Müller also undertook a number of minor improvements to the checkout to make the user experience as smooth as possible. For example, where users previously had to select their title via a drop-down list, they can now select this much more easily via buttons. Form fields were also made compatible with Chrome’s auto-fill function to considerably simplify data input, especially on mobile devices.
All of these improvements resulted in significant gains to Erwin Müller’s bottom line. While revenue had increased by 9% year-over-year in the month before the improvements were made, in the first month after implementation it increased by 47.5%; the month after that, revenue was up by 69%. The surge in orders was even more pronounced: in the first month, the team recorded a 63% year-over-year increase, and in the subsequent month the increase reached 81%.
